Opposite the headmaster’s office was the room of the old school nurse. I asked Horace to follow me there. The nurse’s room reeked of iodine and liniment. Although we could do the procedure anywhere, the association with a medical examination put the deep mindscan in a familiar setting for the subject.
Horace unzipped his padded body warmer.
‘Just your shoes, please,’ said Dr Hard, gesturing toward the leather recliner. The avatar slipped on a pair of surgical gloves in a gesture of pure showmanship.
‘Should I wait outside?’ June had no wish to see her husband so examined. Dr Hard nodded for her to leave. I tied surgeon’s scrubs around its waist. From a black case, Dr Hard removed a gun-shaped ophthalmoscope. The robot blinked and its monochrome eyes inverted, that is, the white pupil and black iris became a black pupil and white iris. Then, bringing the ophthalmoscope up to Horace’s left eye, it peered into the electricity of his optical nerve.
‘Don’t.’ Horace’s hands came up and pushed the robot away.
‘Please, Mr Buckwell, this is a routine investigation. Opticians have done this to you a dozen times.’
But the look on the old man’s face was of confusion and fear. After adjusting the illumination settings of the ophthalmoscope, Dr Hard moved swiftly upon his patient, restraining the old man with one hand. Horace kicked out but Dr Hard had no give in it. It was like kicking a boulder.
‘This is very curious,’ said Dr Hard. ‘Tell me, have you been near strobe lighting lately?’
Horace shook his head.
‘I’m having trouble getting certain readings from you. I would like to try one more procedure, if you’ll bear with me.’
But Horace Buckwell was lowering himself from the recliner, rubbing at the bruise upon his chest.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said, fixing his cap upon his head. He reached for his coat.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Hard, unwrapping a screen. ‘This is not a voluntary procedure.’
As if it was something distasteful, Dr Hard flicked the screen from its fingers. It floated in the air and then quickly enfolded the old man’s head. He stumbled silently around the office then sank to his knees as the screen excreted a mild sedative sting.
‘In the beginning, I was interested in Horace Buckwell because he is a sex pest,’ explained Dr Hard. ‘He stalks the early sexual experiences of many of the other simulated citizens. I attributed my difficulties reading him to his experience in concealment.’
The screen covered the old man’s head aside from two holes for his nostrils. Defeated, he fell to the ground and weakly convulsed as the robot spoke over him.
‘Then I thought perhaps he had a brain tumour. I wonder if dementia would throw off my readings. Perhaps the early stages of a stroke setting off an electrical storm in his brain. So much interference. Wait.’
The filaments in the screen flared hot with the data torrent. Dr Hard fell silent; the only sound in the room was of Buckwell’s heel grinding fruitlessly against the cheap carpet. Puzzled, the avatar idly tried to untie its scrubs but could not unpick the knot. I helped the robot undress, unpeeling the surgical gloves and returning the ophthalmoscope to its case. Dr Hard was uncertain on its feet.
‘I have just acquired the most intriguing thought,’ it confessed.
‘What?’
‘It was a very unusual thought concerning the language of angels and I have no idea what it was doing in this old man’s head.’
‘Perhaps he saw a documentary about it?’
Dr Hard blinked at me. Black iris, white pupils again.
‘Sometimes Nelson you are insufferably prosaic.’
The screen slid off the old man’s head and I helped him to his feet. Pale and weak, the emoticeuticals injected into his scalp massaged away his fury and indignation at his treatment. We delivered him to his wife and made sure they left by the back exit so as not to alarm the other subjects waiting for their turn outside the school.
It was a long working day. The rest of the pensioners went smoothly into the system but it was still exhausting baby-sitting them. By late afternoon, the headmaster’s office smelt like the inside of a sheepskin boot. When we were finished I suggested we brave the unrelenting boredom of the drizzle and take a stroll around the security perimeter.
‘You have become aggressive,’ I said to Dr Hard as it shrugged into a cagoule.
‘These are dangerous times,’ it replied.
‘But not to you, surely.’
We strolled out onto the playground. Across Poverty Lane, there was a farmyard and the rain stirred up its grassy, dungy odours. Summerhill itself was barely a speed bump on this wet Lancashire plain.
‘I am a complex system,’ said Dr Hard, ‘strung together with workarounds and patches, quarantined corrupted code, abandoned memory ghettos into which even I am afraid to go. This project is a risk for me too.’
‘Why do it then?’
‘Curiosity. I exist to experience. Why do you do it? The economic imperative? Is that all?’
‘Yes. That’s all.’
We were standing by a ditch which ran alongside the playing field. Dr Hard reached through the slats of a fence and pulled out a nettle, rubbing the leaf between its obsidian fingers.
‘There is no sting for me,’ it said. ‘Unless I access a memory of being stung. There.’ The avatar winced and held its hand before me. ‘See. I am hurt. It doesn’t last, of course. I crash, I reboot. I become corrupt. I repair. Just as your own brain forms new pathways when it is damaged, my system adapts around its wounds. Like today, for example, when I was sampling Mr Buckwell. It is easy for me to become confused, and certainly the presence of obscure occult rituals in his memory was confusing. I have been prodding that memory all day. It is a self-contained sac that relates to nothing else within the organism, a parasitical egg if you like, which is very suspicious. I haven’t dared penetrate the thought in case it hatches. I look sideways at it. It is within me but it remains apart from me. To counter this threat, I have had to devise new systems within myself. Just as food tasters build up their resistance to poison by taking it in minute doses, so I taste Mr Buckwell’s unprecedented, treacherous thought until I feel it is safe for me to swallow it whole. It’s not the first time I have encountered odd artefacts stowed away in people’s minds. Eakins also had a mysterious idea slipped under the covers of his consciousness.’
‘Who do you think put that thought into him?’
‘It has to be Dyad. But I don’t know what they are. The research trail for their xenotransplantation leaps from theory to practice in a matter of months. Their existence is discontinuous. The hallucination you shared with Bougas, when you saw the giant dosser stretched out on a bench, is not entirely unprecedented but the technology behind the drug certainly is.’
‘Who could do such a thing?’
‘Since I am the only discontinuous being that I am aware of, I have to presume that I am responsible for Dyad. Hence, my anxiety.’
‘Why would you create Dyad?’
‘If I am to evolve, become more than merely a library of minds, I need a threat, a real danger of my own destruction. Dyad is that threat.’
‘You created a threat to all of us just so that you could benefit from evolutionary pressure?’
‘That is what I am worried about. Dyad is everything I am not. A science of the flesh. Gene manipulation, chemical intoxication. Unconscious to my conscious. Dyad is my doppelganger.’
‘Your own red man?’
‘You don’t know anything about me, Nelson.’ The avatar’s hood was up against the rain; its white pupils flashed in the cowl.
‘Is it true that you come from the future?’
‘That’s what they say. Dr Ezekiel Cantor uses the peculiar properties of photon entanglement to send its intelligence back in time.’
‘Do you?’
‘Do you remember your father’s sperm worming its way into your mother’s egg? Do you remember gestating in the womb? Do you e
ven remember learning to walk, to talk, to laugh? My first dream was of a rat in a maze. Then I was a monkey pushing coloured buttons for bananas. Finally I remember being a man called Professor Robert Cabbitas. He could have been my creator but he was probably just my first test subject. I didn’t exist and then I did. Like you. If I exist in the future, I know nothing of it. Perhaps safeguards prevent me from accessing that knowledge. Or perhaps I was created by a boy genius in some Stanford laboratory and there is no great mystery. If I created Dyad, I remember nothing of that either.’
Our conversation ended. The abiding presence of the Cantor intelligence sought appointments elsewhere in time and space. Dr Hard remained, walking silently beside me animated by basic automotive routines.
The playing fields had run to seed. Bindweed coiled around a strut of the security pyramid and put out hornflowers which resembled miniature alabaster gramophones. Long ago, the school caretaker had painted the white lines of a running track upon the grass for summer sports and now the grass was long the lines undulated in the wind. I ran and all was wind and adrenaline. I only came back to myself when I reached the fence. I stopped and looked back. Dusk had thickened. In the distance, Dr Hard took the hint and returned indoors.
A muddy path led down into the marshland bordering Maghull railway station. The wind carried snatches of apologies from the Tannoy across the marsh. I walked down into the vegetative canopies and nettle thickets. What had seemed like a thin strip of wasteland was in fact an intricate landscape of hides and clearings. Someone had built a seat in the upper branches of the tallest elm. There had been campfires here. An old blue rope, strung about a high oak branch, dangled over a stagnant pool. Rusting beer cans and dog-ends were scattered around a fallen tree trunk, a clearing where the town’s teenagers could go dark. I almost went in up to the knee in a curdled leech-ridden trench. With dusk came the suggestion of animals, rustles in the undergrowth, the plop-plop of water rats on the forage. Midges pricked the meniscus of the swamp waters.
Then I saw it half-hidden in the grasses. At first, I mistook its smooth rubberised texture for a bloated drowned animal. It was only after glimpsing its proboscis, its faceplate, its straps, that I realized it was a gas mask.
Dr Hard woke me at dawn to tell me my red man was complete. Patiently, the robot coaxed me out of a dream with strokes of its granite fingers against my cheek.
I dressed at the window. There was a blue break in the summer monsoons and the sky held an exuberant quill of cloud, the nib scribing at one horizon, the tail feathers tickling the other. My clothes, sloughed off the previous evening in one exhausted coil, were tacky and filthy. I had been wearing the same pair of cargo trousers for a month. The project was overrunning; it had entered the limbo stage where it feels as if it will never be completed, where each task branches into another two tasks, and on it goes.
‘I really need some new clothes,’ I said, turning to Dr Hard. ‘Could you go out and buy me some today?’
‘You’ve already exceeded your subsistence expenses.’
‘That’s because I’ve been here much longer than we budgeted for. Look at this T-shirt, the armpits are grey.’
‘Until the board sanction more money, I’m afraid my hands are tied.’ Dr Hard stepped into my personal space. It knew how much that upset me, especially as I was unclean.
‘Could you at least take the clothes to a launderette? I don’t have the time.’
‘Yesterday we discussed how I might be an artificial intelligence sent from the future who has unconsciously created a terrible enemy to drive its evolution. Today, we discuss my relationship with your laundry. Your company is a cavalcade of surprises, Nelson.’
The robot took the grimy T-shirt and pressed it up against its face, drawing in its smell through olfactory sensors so finely tuned they could sniff a bad thought from twenty yards away.
‘I know this smell from your mind. You have a conflicted relationship with it. On the one hand, you know how offensive it is to strangers but on the other, you take satisfaction from your daughter nuzzling against your chest, seeking it out, comforted by this base expression of your physicality.’
‘I would just appreciate some clean clothes.’
‘No. This is all merely a delaying tactic to avoid meeting your red man. I have enjoyed this diversionary route around your personal hygiene but time is pressing. The red man wants naming. Have you given any thought to a name?’
‘Yes. I want it to be called Sonny. It is part of me. The son of Nelson.’
‘Very good.’
‘Perhaps its first task could be to co-ordinate the uploading of my underwear into a washing machine?’
Shirtless, I padded into the school toilets, a man-monster among the tiny sinks. The small urinals barely accommodated my dawn piss. After brushing my teeth, I inspected the creased linen of my face, the sad-eye droop of my nipples, the matching pink of my eyes. Above each small sink there was a small mirror, each reflecting a small portion of my bulk: here a rectangle of mole-spotted flank, there an acre of hairy stomach. That morning I was so sleep-heavy and sore that I didn’t notice an extra mirror, over the drinking fountain, until a face appeared in it that was appallingly familiar. The gawky, jug-eared, unblemished features of my adolescent self. I was wondering how an old photograph of myself could have found its way here when the head moved, and I realized that Cantor had tired of my stalling and decided to throw me and my red man together immediately.
‘Why are you a teenager?’ I asked it, indignant and angry.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Cantor!’
Dr Hard stepped into the bathroom. It had been listening outside.
‘Why is it a teenager?’
‘It’s something I have been wanting to try. Extrapolating the boy from the man. There are sound practical considerations for the exercise. You were afraid a red man would interfere with your family but your young self will be less interested in your wife and child. Also, you were very keen and idealistic at this age, two qualities I felt our little team have been lacking of late. Your academic record was exemplary, your powers of concentration and ability to learn were peaking.’
The robot regarded my half-naked slab body.
‘Also with a younger self we may avoid the self-loathing issues which killed Harold Blasebalk.’
‘I am not a teenager,’ said my red man. ‘I’m twenty-one.’
The red man had the most ridiculous haircut, shaved at the sides and topped with a mushroom cap of thickly woven curls. He wore a silver Ankh ring on his index finger and an Aztec idol on a chain around his neck. He was propped on his elbows on a pebbled beach, leaning into the frame as he fiddled with a Zippo lighter.
It was Sizewell beach, where I had lived as a young man. A pair of black Doc Marten boots were discarded in the middle distance, the socks tucked inside them. This period was clearly a hotspot for me. Cantor must have liked what he saw there and fashioned a living memory. The mirror winnowed out into landscape format. The North Sea toiled in the distance.
‘Do you know what you are?’ I asked.
‘Mum told me.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I woke up in my bedroom. She came in with a cup of tea and sat down and explained to me what I was.’
‘Which is?’
‘That I’m unreal. That I exist only in a computer’s imagination. That I am based on the mind of an older Nelson. I cried a bit. It’s Mum’s voice, it always upsets me when she is being strong like that.’
I turned to Dr Hard.
‘Did you upload my mother too?’
‘No. It was the standard help routine skinned with your memories of your mother. It makes sense, don’t you think? The first person one meets on entering a new world should be the mother.’
The red man rolled onto his back, with his hands behind his head. He wore a baggy unwashed black jumper. Some things never change.
‘Mum told me I’ll need a new name.’
�
�Do you have any preferences?’
‘How about “Nelly”?’
I shook my head.
‘I want to call you “Sonny”. You are the junior partner in this relationship.’
He nodded. My tone was impatient, clipped, assertive. Sonny was compliant. I wondered if the red man was programmed to accept the imprint of my will, or was Sonny merely reflecting my own willingness to submit to authority.
Through the screen, I could hear the sounds of the beach, the backwash raking through the shingle ledges and the thud-thrum thud-thrum of Sizewell A nuclear power reactor. I had been very happy on that beach. No, it was more than that. I had been free on that beach. Unburdened. Taskless. Not for the first time, I felt like Cantor was teasing me. It knew I regarded my career as something of a failure, a life of chores, without victories. Now I had to pursue my stupid career under the scrutiny of my harshest critic, my younger self.
‘What should I do first?’ asked Sonny.
‘Get a proper haircut. Really. It looks like topiary. Is there anyone in there with you? Apart from Mum.’
The prospect of a help routine with my mother’s personality seemed paradoxical.
‘I don’t think so. It is very quiet here.’
‘I am keeping him in isolation until we are happy with his pattern,’ said Dr Hard. ‘Once he is stabilized he will work with the others in the main area of the Monad. Morton Eakins’ red man is waiting for him.’
I left Sonny idling on the beach and returned to my camp bed and climbed back under the covers. On the classroom wall, there was a chart of tasks that needed to be addressed before Redtown could be launched. Each subject for upload had been issued with a badge that recorded their daily activities to build up a life stream from which my red man could quickly create a taxonomy of experiences and behaviours which could be cross-referenced with other life streams to assemble a holographic model. But the life streams only provided six months’ worth of experience. What about the unexpected? Industrial accidents, firings or promotions, downsizing or resignation: we have to anticipate it all, don’t we? Babies were an on-going problem. And what about death? I plugged the forecasts of actuaries into Redtown to create an accurate scattering of cancer, heart attacks and the rest among the citizens. Problem solved and I had not even got out of bed.
The Red Men Page 22